2.14.2007

IMPORTANT POST

I'VE MOVED, CHANGED TITLES,
CHANGED MY NAME.

YOU, CHANGE YOUR BOOKMARKS.

(please)

http://nomadicdesigner.wordpress.com/

2.01.2007

when did that happen

i swear someone slipped something into my food last night. i had dinner with lou and erin at bergoff's around 5:30 and was antsy. am still antsy. dinner was fantastic - or let's say the company was (food not so hot and beer not so cold), i haven't seen lou or erin in a solid 1.5 months since they got married and it's been too long!

afterwards i cabbed it home and paced. paced like i used to do in high school when i was on the phone, i used to circle the dining room table endlessly for hours, sometimes switch to the kitchen island and then return to the dining room, walking like i was generating the energy for the phone the old-fashioned way. i did that last night for the television, for the movie, for the dishes and the laundry. was MOVING until 2am.

dreamt i was trying to put on gloves, looked down to see what the problem was, and found all of my fingers to be out of joint. i had to pull them to get the knuckles to go back into place, and they cracked loudly like splitting wood.

woke up calmly but with a chip on my shoulder that i expressed by wearing my aviators. softened up quickly when a toddler was crying from being cold (and probably from being bored). i loaned her my rainbow mittens and scarf, and chatted with her mom, who was probably my age.

got to work a few minutes late, around 9:15... now it's 10:45 and i keep forgetting and remembering again that i have a new doctor to meet at 5pm today. my regular doctor isn't in my Aetna network, so i had to choose a new one and convince them to maintain my referral to my new endocrinologist for my appointment a week from tomorrow. i'm really excited to get crackin on this thing.

still in the mild stress mode. moved on from the silverchair into the matisyahu (a new love).

1.25.2007

if there's such a thing as an inoffensive silverchair song title, i'd put it here

don't we all sometimes get into those funkadelic throwback moods where we want nothing more in our little ears than that first music that grabbed us by the collar and threw us against the wall? kicked us while we were down and picked us up again, only to hold us by our ankles out of a third story window?

it seems the more exhausted i am, the closer i come to seeing spots, the more i crave that thrashing wild music i first started listening to when i was about thirteen. the magical year i first discovered silverchair or toadies, more commonly perceived as the end of the new grunge era. nirviana and bush had been big for a while, and the new kids were showing up on the market. long before i was gently introduced to the much nicer and happier singer/songwriter action of dispatch or iron and wine. nick drake was not yet an obsession, although he has been very good to me. nothing against what came later, but that first love is for most people the one you fall hardest for and never forget.

this was before i hated clearchannel and still listened to the radio...

it was perfect for that time in my life, it was all the energy i had to burn and it was a magical world to have my walkman blasting angry heat that i took into myself and said, someone else feels this too. someone else knows that the world is bigger and meaner than what health class tries to teach me, and these people know i have every chance at fighting my way through it. and whenever i'm approaching a new challenge that takes that extra degree of resilience i do two things - sleep less, and bust out the battle hymns.

oh, silverchair, i don't even like you that much anymore, but i'm glad to have you around.
(this friday i'm making a presentation to the office president about using usurping the creative team and their otherwise billable creative time for a glue network project.
LOVE REQUIRES ACTION
)


hey, anyone reading? let's hear what your battle hymns are.
throw 'em in the comments --

1.17.2007

time exists but just on your wrist so don't panic

so it finally snowed in Chicago last weekend.
it'll probably be gone by this afternoon :)

this morning i got up at 5:30 and was at my desk at 6:30 to get a ton of small things done. Glad to say I was successful... things faxed, sent, e-mailed, checked on. All done!

today i'm doing research on current/near future Generation Y trends through the lenses of music, sports, innovation, and peer to peer networking (OFFLINE, you myspace geeks!) like business expos. young adult / new professional trends.

as part of my job i get to read a lot and tear up magazines for mood boards, visual representations of the points i'm trying to make that we use in meetings and, more notably, brainstorms (like the huge one i'm working on putting together for friday):
my desk is kind of controlled chaos. it's going well.

today i also did something i've done before that's mildly frightening: while i was writing i misspelled something by writing "t" when i meant to write "r." which, if we're paying attention, are two keys NEXT TO EACH OTHER ON THE KEYBOARD.

I'M WRITING TYPOS. LONGHAND.

i'm a little stressed out, in a good way. this week and last week have both been wild with the Dispatch reunion concert being unleashed onto the devil no wait, Ticketmaster. shoot. i mean to say, the evil antithesis of everything that's good about music. then there's a brainstorm last week, another one this week, and in the meantime i'm cleaning up an Elias Fund project and trying to get my whole office behind me in supporting the Glue Network, and setting up a meeting to plan an EVENT that may or may not be a mural project. or concert. this summer in chicago.

but i'm more convinced than ever that i love my job, i'm surrounded by amazing minds, and any ounce of struggle i have is self-imposed and entirely worth it. i'm flexing my soul, here, and it's getting stronger :)

1.13.2007

recap!

haven't even thought about this little corner of my mind in a couple of weeks. lot of s**t going down, some very busy days at work. plus the consistent and nagging fact that without photos, i feel like reading about my mundane day-to-day stuff is very, very tedious.

but i got a new phone! with a camera! so there are a couple of picts. the quality's decent, here is what it looks like to make gingerbread:
let us pause to acknowledge the use of baking soda in this recpie. also known as the active ingredient in science fair volcanoes. this mess BEGAN as a thin layer of boiled molasses and brown sugar, ginger and allspice; add the baking soda and it nearly TOOK ON ITS OWN LIFE AS THE BLOB AND TRIED TO EAT ME. or at least jump out of the pot.

i didn't know the butter and eggs would mellow it out... i threw them in out of desperation. i panicked.

also in our recap i want to revisit the amazing nature of my office, our mini-golf office party and moroccan themed shindig that evening.

does this make more sense now? we literally golfed around the office along the homemade course (lined with various colored tapes). here's mohammed figuring out his shot - i didn't make par on this one cause i chipped and only knocked down the top two cans. we had to kill all three to get the hole! my bad.

some people came in costume.

later on, other people had costumes (but she worked at Tizi) (at least i hope she did)

and to finish, a couple more shots from tizi as the night went on...



in other news, the upcoming freelance break is getting closer and i'm feeling better and better about it. it's really weird, how freeing myself a little from the stress of it actually has made me work faster to get everyone done. i'm getting a ton finished these days, it's very liberating.

hope everyone's holidays were what they wanted.
cheers to 2007, off to a great start.